❝death is only the beginning.❞
Mara El-Masri's fascination with the long-ago world of ancient Egypt started with the stories her stepfather would tell her when she was a child. Her brother Talib El-Masri is missing, left after their mother's funera...
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WHAT BEGINS YET HAS NO END, YET ENDS ALL THAT BEGINS?
Mara hadn't stopped thinking about the riddle since she heard it. The answer was death, she understood that much, but nothing else about it made sense. Sarah had said it in an ancient tongue she couldn't possibly know. She wouldn't even be able to recognize the non-hieroglyphic written language of the ancient Egyptians, let alone say any of it aloud. It had to have been him. What did he want with her? Who was Khafre?
There'd be no answer in her research and she knew that, but Mara looked anyway. She looked desperately through her research in the study, accompanied by the light of her lamp and the moonlight through the sheer curtains, and found nothing. It was the middle of the night, hours after finding out her daughter had been cursed somehow and hours after taking her to the museum so she could point out anything she had touched from the secret room that could have done this to her. Sarah was fast asleep now, out like a light after the day. It was fortunate she was sleeping so peacefully when wakefulness was nothing but a walking nightmare for the girl.
"Darling?" Jonathan's voice sounded from the open door as she was grabbing another book from the shelf. Mara looked up, catching sight of the clock on the wall as well as him. It was around midnight. He still looked tired. She wasn't sure if he'd gotten much sleep either. "You know, I get worried when I wake up in the middle of the night and my wife's not beside me."
"I'm sorry. I couldn't sleep."
"You think I have?" Jonathan inquired with raised brows as he came further into the room. Mara quietly sighed. Well, that confirmed that, then. He seemed to have been asleep when she left their bedroom around eleven, but it was probably not restful for him. It hadn't been for her. "What are you doing in here?"
"Trying to understand how this could have happened to her."
"I don't think you'll be able to."
"That's what I'm realizing," Mara muttered, setting the book on the desk next to the rest of her research. None of it was in any sort of order, all thrown in disarray in the past hour. She set her palms flat on the desk and added, eyes sweeping over ten years worth of work toward finding Nefertiri's tomb, "There was no indication in any of my research Nefertiri shared her tomb with anyone. Let alone a pharaoh from a completely different dynasty."
"Leave the research to Evy and Alex. Come back to bed."
"I can't." Mara reached for her open journal on the other side of the desk and put it in front of her. The pen was in the center on the spine, keeping it open to a page of practically incoherent and scratched out writing, all done in the past hour. Nothing came of it. All but one riddle from the key was lost to her. What begins but has no end, yet ends all that begins? "That—that riddle she said, I can't stop thinking about it. The answer is death. I can't remember what the other riddles on the Hamunaptra key were."
